William Gaffikin
rugby player
William Gaffikin (31 July 1853 — 17 July 1939) was an Irish international rugby union player.
Raised in Belfast, Gaffikin was the youngest son of local councillor and linen merchant Thomas Gaffin. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and was a rugby player in his youth, gaining an Ireland cap in the team's first ever international match in 1875, against England at The Oval.
Gaffikin went into the linen trade and became head of his father's company.
“William Gaffikin” enters the record as rugby player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Gaffikin and rugby can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“William Gaffikin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, William, Gaffikin and rugby provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q130855083. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1853, 1939 and 1875.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Gaffikin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.